The Bilingual Writer: Two Estonian-Russian Cases and One Russian-Estonian Case 1 Irina Belobrovtseva

Methis. Studia humaniora Estonica 2018, no. 21/22 The Bilingual Writer: Two Estonian-Russian Cases and One Russian-Estonian Case 1 Irina Belobrovtseva Abstract: The present article addresses the problem of literary bilingualism. Summing up linguists’ disagreements concerning the content and scope of the notion of bilingualism, this article, which in its practical part addresses the situation of Russian-Estonian literary bilingualism, can be considered a prolegomenon to this subject. The problem of Estonian-Russian literary bilingualism is discussed on the basis of the poetic output of Jaan Kaplinski (whose native language is Estonian) and Igor Kotjukh (whose native language is Russian), both of whom have been active as bilingual writers for many years, and on the basis of a recently published novel by Kalle Käsper, Чудо (Wonder, 2017)—Kalle Käsper’s debut as a Russian writer. The problem of literary bilingualism will be discussed in the framework of the following methods: stylistic analysis of the text, interviews with bilingual writers, and the analysis of bilingual writers’ texts from the perspective of the presence of Russian/Estonian linguistic and cultural substrata. DOI: 10.7592/methis.v17i21/22.14582 Keywords: bilingualism in present-day cross-cultural discourse, literary aspect of bilingualism, bilingual writers’ literary output Due to the very naming of the notion and in historical retrospective, bilingualism has been studied primarily by linguists, yet it is also a subject of interest of such disci- plines as philosophy, psychology, sociology, social psychology, and literary criti- cism. Yet even linguists have discrepancies in their understanding of what bilingualism actually is. What is regarded as a classical definition of the notion is that of Uriel Weinreich, who stated that bilingualism is the individual’s ability to know two languages, and switch from one language to another depending on the communicative situation. In general and at first glance, linguists’ attitude to bilingualism approaches the recognition of bilingualism as something that does not necessarily demand the equally ideal command of two languages (André Martinet); neither does it require equal proficiency in such competencies as understanding, speaking, reading, and writing in a foreign tongue (John T. Macnamara). This point of view is shared (with 1 Research for this article was supported by the institutional research grant “Estonia between East and West: The Paradigm of the Images of “Own”, “Other”, “Strange”, “Enemy” in Estonian Cultures in the 20th Century” (IUT18-4) and the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies (CEES, European Regional Development Fund). 8 THE BILINGUAL WRITER additions and reservations) by Eduard Blocher, Leonard Bloomfield and others. A more strict definition of bilingualism can be found, for example, in Словарь лингвистических терминов (The Dictionary of Linguistic Terms) by Olga Akhmanova (1969, 125), who agrees to understand двуязычие (diglossia) only as “a perfect command of two languages used in different communicative situations”. Since the present article addresses the situation of Estonian-Russian literary bilingualism, I should say a couple of words about its specific character. While any language pair in the model “Estonian language vs a language X” can be studied objectively, on purely scientific grounds, virtually any inquiry into the situation of Estonian-Russian and Russian-Estonian bilingualism seems impossible without mentioning specific historical conditions: Estonian linguists remember the times of Russification, which was conducted twice: at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, while Estonia was a part of the Russian Empire, and after the establishment of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1940s. Passive resistance to imperial and Soviet policy was a matter of honour for Estonian intelligentsia, who managed to preserve the Estonian language until Estonia regained independence in 1991. At times, such a firm resistance to Russification went beyond the scope of purely scholarly discussions, and resulted in speculative hypotheses that lacked well- grounded proofs. For example, according to the opinion of an authoritative Estonian linguist, Mati Hint, at the end of 1980 in an article which would later become a part of his book Keel on tõde on õige ja vale (Language is the Truth, True and False), [. .] bilingualism is an individual’s ability to use two languages equally or nearly equally (also in thoughts). The real bilingual can switch from one language to another even in the middle of a sentence. Bilingualism is achieved in the period of mother-tongue acquisition (until the age of five or six) in families or in foreign-language environments, not in a classroom. (Hint 2002, 309) Having stated this, Hint made a reference to two already obsolete books by Alfred Koort (1938) and George G. Thompson (1962), which promoted the idea of bilinguals’ retarded development. Following Martinet, who had stressed the fact that the problem of individual bilingualism should be studied more thoroughly, Hint stated that what have yet to be studied are the potential threats of bilingualism. He claimed that although 90 percent of pupils succeed in second-language-acquisition classes (having in mind the Russian language, the obligatory study of which was gradually taking more and more space in Soviet Estonia’s school curricula), the remaining 10 percent of pupils were likely to suffer from retarded development caused by bilingualism, thus losing the opportunity to succeed in their adult lives. The political underside of these state- 9 Methis. Studia humaniora Estonica 2018, no. 21/22 IRINA BELOBROVTSEVA ments was clear to everyone: the language of a small nation had to be defended, and in perestroika times, the linguist preferred to make an unverifiable statement in order to defend his mother tongue regardless of the existence of such an experi- mentally-grounded work such as, e. g. The Relation of Bilingualism to Intelligence by Canadian scholars Elizabeth Peal and Wallace E. Lambert, who testified to advan- tages of bilingualism such as “mental flexibility, a superiority in concept formation, a more diversified set of mental abilities” (Peal and Lambert 1962, 20). That Hint did not refer to this or analogous works, e.g. those of Peter Ball, Howard Giles and Miles Hewstone (1984), in which bilingualism and its issues are not defined strictly as a linguistic phenomenon, can be explained not only by the political agenda itself, but also by the disadvantageous state of Soviet scholars (let me remind that we are talking about the late 1980s, i.e. about the Soviet period in Estonian history), who were cut off from the latest achievements in Western thought by the iron curtain. During the 30 years following the publication of Hint’s article, scholars’ treat- ment of bilingualism changed radically. The most noteworthy change took place at the end of the century. Most turn-of-the-century studies in this field addressed the cognitive aspect of bilingualism (Genesee 1989; Nicoladis and Secco 1998), and paved the way for a series of experiments by Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin Rhee, who in 2004 proved the existence of inborn bilingualism. What was also proved was the concept that bilingualism was formed through learning, i.e. after the completion of acquisition of the mother tongue. More appositely, refuting fears of bilingualism’s negative influence upon a fragile human psyche, science has come to the conclusion that bilingualism boosts cognitive abilities, and even prevents dementia in the elderly. By the mid-20th century, the Cuban cultural theorist Fernando Ortiz introduced the notion of transculturality, implying the development of cultural synergy, i.e. “an individual’s simultaneous existence in the role of multiple identities in different cultures preserving footprints of each of them” (Proshina 2017, 158). The process of globalization contributes to the growth of the number of bilinguals in everyday life; consequentially, the phenomenon of diglossy and polyglossy still preoccupies scholars’ minds. Yet the present article addresses a more specific aspect of bilingualism—bilingualism in literature, more precisely Estonian-Russian and Russian-Estonian literary bilingualism. It should be noted that there are no discrepancies among definitions of literary bilingualism, unlike studies of bilingualism as a linguistic phenomenon: bilingual writers are those, who have perfect command of two or more languages—endowing them, as Rita Safariants (2007, 193) aptly said, with “multifaceted linguistic capital”. Since the very fact of the existence of literary bilingualism is beyond doubt, it is 10 THE BILINGUAL WRITER surprising to come across a work under the essayistic rather than the scholarly title Литературный билингвизм: за и против (Literary Bilingualism: Pro et contra) (Valuitseva and Khukhuni 2015), as if a personal standpoint could question the phenomenon’s very existence. What I see here is a subjective, judgmental aspect. Thus many scholars refer to Mikhail Alekseyev’s opinion, who noted—in his study of French texts by August Strindberg, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde— that all these texts should have been edited, as they were marred by a “foreign accent,” and “inaccuracies from the viewpoint of a natural-born Frenchman.” As a result, Mikhail Alekseyev came to the conclusion that “writers’ second-language acquisition ability has its limits, and the creative freedom in

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